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Re: Rs

From:Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
Date:Saturday, April 5, 2003, 17:01
Quoting Tristan McLeay <kesuari@...>:

> Adam Walker wrote: > > > Wait a minute maybe not my bad. > > > Please don't send HTML emails. Many people won't be able to read your > message. > > The trailing -n in 'don on' and 'don off' is the Middle English > infinitive from before it was replaced by the to preposition. The > actual > words that were contracted probably didn't have this 'n' in them.
Replaced by? German does still retain the infinitival _-n_ in _zu tun_ "to do", but as seen still uses the preposition to. So I'd been sort of assuming this infinitival marker was inherited from the common ancestor ... am I wrong? Andreas

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John Cowan <cowan@...>